Domain: bloomington.in.us
Stories and comments across the archive that link to bloomington.in.us.
Comments · 14
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Re:US politics...
No, it's not. Mormons deny the doctrine of the trinity [1], they profess that there are sins the blood of Christ is incapable of paying for [2], they deny the existence of hell [3], and they deny the eternity and uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian God [4]. These are all basic tenets that have been fundamental to defining "what is a Christian?" ever since the question was first asked in the first couple centuries A.D. No Christian church accepts the unique doctrines that Mormonism teaches [5] [6].
Just as it is incorrect for non-Hindus to say, "This is the authoritative word on what is and what is not Hinduism," (or non-Muslims for Islam, or non-Atheists for Atheism, or what have you), it is incorrect for non-Christians to say, "This doctrine over here is Christian!" -
Make Emacs taste like TextMate
I frigging love TextMate. I love the directory browsing "project" system, I love the fact that it's dead simple to create custom macros/commands (using bash/python/ruby/perl!), and I love its snippets features.
However. It's not cheap, not cross-platform, and the "Emacs-like keybindings" are just bastardized enough to drive me up the wall. So I'm sticking with Emacs for now.
For anyone interested, here are some quick ways to modify the One True Editor to behave a bit more like TextMate:
Directory browsing of projects: Try Emacs Code Browser.
Snippets: Check out msf-abbrev. You'll be able to specify cursor location, fields, etc. similar to TextMate. I've also heard good things about Skeleton Mode).
Macros: Try the Power Macros package.
Quick(er) buffer-switching: The ido.el package works wonders for me. Note: If you're used to running dired from find-file, you'll want to set ido-show-dot-for-dired to t in your .emacs. -
Re:While we're talking about illegal immigration..
Moreover, unlike India-Bangladesh relations are not benign as the US-Mexico relations currently seem to be, with a number of alleged fundamentalist religious organizations from Pakistan using the porous border to carry out terrorist activities on Indian soil.
But 99.9% of both Pakistan and Bangladesh (East Pakistan) are Religion of Peace members. Don't Indians know that Islam means peace. Why do they have to be so racist in their immigration policy? -
Re:TextMate (OS X) is a very nice IDE
emacs can do this too, with msf-abbrevs:
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~brutt/msf-abbrev.htm l
watch the demo for more info. -
Re:Disabled functionsAnybody up for writing a petition to this effect and sending it to the VPs of marketing at the 5 or 7 major studios?
Jim Witte
jswitte@bloomington.in.us
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte -
Re:Disabled functionsPlease do check. I for one would like to know. I would have sent an email asking this question, but Slashdot doesn't have any private email function (why the %#%$ not? It would encourage people to get together to work on issues? Isn't that supposed to be one of the goals of
/.? See my website [soon] for rants of this nature)Jim Witte
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte
"Spam! Bah - just get Jaguar!" -
Re:cool quotes!
Sure thing! You can actually find quotes like this all over:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/artic les/fee/average.html
http://www.cei.org/gencon/029,03332.cfm
http://www.off-road.com/green/ecoquote.html
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~lgthscac/biblicalchr istianity'sdefinition.htm
If you copy one of those quotes into Google, you'll come up with a whole slew of good results.
Offtopic Stuff:
Always good to compliment the fellow slashdotter - the sliderule thing mentioned in your sig is awesome. I got a couple sliderules and read the Log-Log Duplex Decitrig Slide Rule Manual to learn how to use them. My plan was to use a sliderule in the classes where calculators were not allowed :)
Hopefully the sliderule will not go the way of the Abacus.. the symbols in the books that teach abacus algorithms are all forgotten; nobody knows how to use an abacus like we did at the beginning of the century. It took only 50 years of western influence (pencil and paper math) on Japan at the beginning of the 20th century for them to completely forget how to use it. Pretty amazing. Although we can at least read our former sliderule books, hardly anybody knows how to use them. And for a legitimate reason too: we have calculators. -
Re:Design patterns and Lisp
That kind of flexibility, which allows the programmer to mold the language to fit his (and his tasks) needs, is really what makes Lisp great to work with.
"That kind of flexibility, which allows the programmer to mold the language to fit the needs of the task, is really what makes Lisp great to work with."
It's not quite the same, but it's worth making an effort to write in a gender-neutral fashion. IMO, "one" is just fine, but some people are not used to using it and hearing it, so it sounds awkward.
If you don't agree that gender-neutral language is a worthwhile pursuit, maybe you will after reading Douglas Hofstadter's hilarious essay on the topic. -
Re:Not yet!
Your example ("IBM has
...; they have ...") is gramatically incorrect in America and any other English-speaking country.
Grammar is determined by usage. I tried has/have (well, more or less) on IRC, and asked if anybody wanted to complain; nobody did. Certainly, if you google around, you will find lots of people mixi
ng the singular and plural that way, even columnists. (random examples:
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/16270.html
http://www.forbes.com/2001/01/10/0110ibm.html
ht tp://www-1.ibm.com/services/innovation/abercromb ie.shtml
-- search for "they have". Unfortunately, I can't find a Safire example).
Wait, I'm an idiot. They is grammatically a plural but semantically a neuter singular! So, it's not inconsistent at all. And it just happens to work out to the same text in British English, but without the nonstandard semantics on "they". Neat!
Although it does not address this particular topic, you might want to refer to A Person Paper On Purity In Language.
In addition, it is untrue that "companies are people in America."
In a legal sense, it is quite true -- see Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. for details.
...are fictitious entities
Corporations are far from fictitious -- they're as real as political parties, house parties, or dirt. Should corporations exist? In their current form? With their current rights and privileges? Off-topic in the extreme. But corporations are as real as you or I, if not as human. -
not a company, but..
The City of Bloomington, IN will be doing this. All of our servers are Linux, with the exception of one NT machine for a small Progress database, and several HP-UX machines for Oracle. We'll be migrating them to Linux in 2002.
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Slashdot readers actually influencing politics?Hmm, does this mean that the Slashdot readership and other tech lobbies are actually having a (gasp!) effect on American politics? I myself wrote a five-page letter (by MS Word's reckoning; breaking the first rule of writing to representative: keep it short), based on the EFF template, detailing why encryption restrictions won't work, and then faxed it to all the members of the Antiterrorism Bill confernence committee. You can find the letter here.
I haven't gotten any responses back from any congresscritters, save for one form letter from Sen. Inouye of Hawaii. I don't really pretend that my lobbying had any great "straw" effect, but I wonder if Judd's apparent reversal of his stance means that Congress is beginning to react?
But, IMO, the damage is already done. The proposal has been floated, and the idea is still out there. Of course, it's been out there for the last five years or so, ever since the NSA tried to silence R, S, and A from publishing their article in Scientific American (see Levy's Crypto for a full account)
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Another city
The city of Bloomington, IN is currently in the process of running conduit all over town for 1000BaseLX fiber. The press release from last year is here.
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Another city
The city of Bloomington, IN is currently in the process of running conduit all over town for 1000BaseLX fiber. The press release from last year is here.
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Re:Bah.
Keep in mind that Slashdot is a pretty geek-heavy community, and many of us had a lousy time in high school and college courtesy of the people who are now playing football. This can make for extended bitterness. Q.v. Beer and Circus .